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Comment by jimmygrapes | Hacker News Reader

Every time I try to search for a phone number (Bing/ddg) I get pages and pages of clearly auto generated fake names associated with numbers, all hosted on that same Turkish government portal. I don't know why.

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Does anyone know the purpose served by those reverse phone number search sites that list hundreds of thousands of fake names and fake addresses?

The purpose is to serve ads and make money. They can do that because people will search for unknown numbers and names.

When these fake name/number sites first appeared about 5-8 years ago, they didn't have any ads or even outgoing links. (I looked without an ad blocker.) Ads might be the explanation for many of them today, but I don't think it's the original or sole reason. Though I suppose it may have begun as a proof of concept without ads to gauge the traffic, then ads got added years later.

I've read speculation that they were started by telephone spammers to poison the utility of those who-called-me websites that highlighted spammers' phone numbers. I don't think that's the real reason either. It sounds too cute and clever for spammers. (As an aside: nowadays those services are useless since spammers can so easily fake the caller-ID.)

I'm still thinking that there is an interesting story for the original purpose.

I get similar -- see my comment. But never gov.tr

These are not on a goverment site, just the usual SEO spam.

Interesting, Are you sure it’s turkiye.gov.tr?

Not entirely sure, no. Happens on work PC using Chrome (with uBlock Origin and most lists activatsd), but not at all on phone using Firefox, despite identical searches just tested now. I don't know enough about how this works to say much more.

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